The Challenge

Over the last thirty days, I watched thirty movies.

Why did I do this? Besides “for fun”, the motivator for making it into a challenge was the fact that my to-watch list was getting longer every day, and I was finding it hard to make time to actually sit down and watch them. Once, about three years ago, I did a “seven movies in seven days” challenge. For that one, I was specifically watching famous or culturally significant movies that I’d never seen before. I watched The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and I did feel enriched by the experience, but I probably never would have bothered to watch it were it not for the challenge aspect.

For this challenge, I didn’t have a particular theme, other than to clear out my watchlist backlog. I started with the films I had downloaded onto my computer; some of them were from five-plus years ago.

Some Statistics

Out of the thirty movies, I liked seventeen of them. Not bad, considering that 90% of everything is crap. Of course, I wasn’t picking movies out of a hat – they were on my to-watch list because something I’d read about them made me think I’d like them. So I guess I have 50% accuracy when it comes to picking movies I’ll like.

Seven of the thirty were non-English language – two Japanese, two Korean, one French, one German, and one Polish. I liked all of them, which isn’t surprising – for a foreign film to get enough attention to land on my list, it would have to be exceptionally good.

The oldest film was from 1944, the newest from 2021. I was surprised that I liked all three of the oldest films; I’ve clearly been missing out by not watching more classics.

Nicholas Cage starred in two of the thirty movies. I disliked both, although in their defense, they were both almost good.

I also decided to track whether the films passed the Bechdel test, which simply states that a film “passes” if it has at least two female characters who talk to each other about something other than a man. It’s kind of crazy how few movies in general pass the test. In this list, nine movies failed to clear this incredibly low bar, and I was being fairly generous with passing movies. Double Indemnity got a pass because a mother and daughter have a scene where, if I recall properly, they each speak one sentence to each other. Can you imagine a world in which this was reversed? I believe Bit was the only film on this list that didn’t pass a reverse Bechdel test.

Prolonged Exposure To Film Considered Harmful

After watching thirty movies in thirty days, I’ve become more jealous of my time. If you watch a few movies a year, a movie being mediocre is acceptable; watching one every day, mediocrity is a lot harder to forgive, especially when you have examples of truly good films so fresh in your mind.

The neatest thing about this experience was being able to figure out what I like and dislike about films. By the end of the thirty days, I found myself watching these movies with more of a critical eye. Not a negative eye, but a critical one, able to see why a movie worked or didn’t work.

A lot of mediocrity boils down to two things: not being original, and having no real emotions behind the story.

The first one is obvious; many movies are simply retreads of well-worn tropes and genre conventions. The more movies you watch, the more these stick out and start to become a problem. Again, if you only watch a few movies a year, you may never even notice similarities, because you’ve simply forgotten about them.

The second issue, the lack of emotion, is harder to describe (and, probably, much more subjective). As I write this paragraph, I’m not even sure how explain it, since it’s kind of a gut feeling. I’d get done with a movie, and in for the bad ones, I’d feel… nothing. They may have been somewhat enjoyable in the moment, but they had no lasting impact. The good films, in contrast, had some kind of impact. They were thought provoking. I’d have been so invested in the story, that when it ended, I didn’t want it to.

I think I lack the vocabulary to clearly explain what I mean. I’ll try again in a future blog post.

My Favorites

The Lure

This is a Polish film. It’s a… horror?/musical??/romance???? about two sirens (man eating mermaids) who come ashore for some fun, get a job as singers/strippers at an upscale(?) strip club… at one point the sea god Triton asks one of them to join his punk band… listen, this movie is hard to describe. Whatever you pictured from that description is totally wrong. Apparently, it’s a reworking of the original The Little Mermaid story by Hans Christian Andersen.

It’s a very musical film, and every other scene is basically a music video. The music is great, all the singing is fantastic, and the visuals are great. All the acting is top-notch. There’s a conversation conducted entirely in high-pitch dolphin noises, and not only is it completely understandable just from the acting, it’s not the least bit silly. It’s also notable for having a lot of nudity, yet never once did it seem gratuitous or titillating. The director being a woman probably has something to do with that.

The Man From Earth

The whole movie takes place in one room, as a professor, who’s moving out of of town on short notice, explains to his friends how he’s actually 14,000 years old. This film has been on my to-watch list for years (not 14,000 years, though) and I hadn’t watched it because I knew the basics of what the film was about and didn’t think it could be all that interesting. I was wrong. It’s great. I think it does a particularly good job of slowly drawing the viewer in, but also showing how the characters listening to this guy’s story are also being slowly drawn in and coming to believe it.

Phoenix

Set a year or two after the end of World War 2, a Jewish woman who survived Auschwitz returns to Berlin in search of her husband. She was shot in the face and needed facial reconstruction surgery, and when she finds her husband, he doesn’t recognize her. However, he does recognize that she looks a lot like his former wife, who he thinks is dead, and pitches her the idea of her impersonating his dead wife (that is to say, impersonating herself) in order to collect inheritance money (of which there is a lot of, because you know, the holocaust).

Part of the reason she doesn’t tell him who she is right away is because she has circumstantial evidence that he’s the one that turned her over to the Nazis. It’s a fantastic film; gorgeous cinematography and excellent acting. It’s funny watching this right after Split, because one thing I found annoying in Split was the “silently look into the distance” thing the main character did a lot. In that film, it conveyed nothing, due to a lacking of talent in… pretty much every area of the film. In this one, the silent moments actually speak volumes about the characters’ feelings.

It’s a Summer Film!

I have a soft spot in my heart for films about kids making films; I really enjoyed Super 8, as well. This is a story about a high school girl who finally decides to make the samurai film of her dreams after she meets a guy that will be perfect for the lead role… but unbeknownst to her, he’s a time traveling fanboy of hers from the future who just came back to see her debut film, and never intended to get mixed up in it. It’s funny, it’s heartwarming, it’s inspiring.

The Movies, Rated

As mentioned previously, these ratings are a bit harsh. Mediocre movies get a thumbs down. I’m not saying they’re 100% bad and you’re dumb if you like them, I’m only saying that if there’s a checkmark, I definitely enjoyed the film.

The List, in Order of Viewing:

Name	Good?	Passes the Bechdel Test
Vanilla Sky (2001)	✅	❌
A Spy Movie (2021)	✅	✅ (technically)
Joint Security Area (2000)	✅	❌
Your Name (2016)	✅	✅
The Lure (2015)	✅	✅
Double Indemnity (1944)	✅	✅ (barely)
Enemy (2013)	❌	❌
How I live Now (2013)	❌	✅
Lord of Tears (2013)	❌	❌
Lost in Translation (2003)	❌	✅
The Day After (1983)	✅	✅
The Front Line (2011)	✅	❌
Split (2016)	❌	✅
Phoenix (2014)	✅	✅
The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996)	✅	✅
Out of the Past (1947)	✅	❌
Sound of My Voice (2011)	❌	✅
The Man From Earth (2007)	✅	✅
Bit (2019)	✅	✅
Her (2013)	❌	❌
The Harder They Fall (2021)	❌	✅
The Neon Demon (2016)	❌	✅
Mandy (2018)	❌	✅
Color Out of Space (2019)	❌	❌
It’s a Summer Film! (2020)	✅	✅
Les Diaboliques (1955)	✅	✅
Don’t Look Up (2021)	✅	✅
John Dies in the End (2012)	✅	❌
Anna and the Apocalypse (2017)	❌	✅